Obama Tries Hard to Be President Friedman, but Still Isn’t Bonkers Enough

One would hope that our politicians would rise to the challenge by putting forth fair and credible recovery proposals that match the scale of our debt problem and contain the three elements that any serious plan must have: spending cuts, increases in revenues and investments in the sources of our strength. But that, alas, is not what we’re getting, which is why there remains an opening for an independent third party candidate in the 2012 campaign.

Hmm, spending cuts, revenue increases, investments that are supposed to help us win the future…. Does that remind you of any politician you know? Poor Barack Obama–he’s trying his hardest to be President Tom Friedman, and he still can’t get any love from the original.

It needs to be said that the columnist the president seems to be trying most hard to please (especially now that David Brooks has jilted him) is absolutely bonkers when it comes to economics. His column begins: “It becomes clearer every week that our country faces a big choice: We can either have a hard decade or a bad century.” By “hard” he presumably means like we’ve been having–and somehow keeping 9 percent of our workforce out of productive employment for a decade is going to make things better up through 2111? What this is really is sadism masquerading as masochism.

Extra! Magazine Editor Since 1990, Jim Naureckas has been the editor of Extra!, FAIR's monthly journal of media criticism. He is the co-author of The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error, and co-editor of The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the '90s. He is also the co-manager of FAIR's website. He has worked as an investigative reporter for the newspaper In These Times, where he covered the Iran-Contra scandal, and was managing editor of the Washington Report on the Hemisphere, a newsletter on Latin America. Jim was born in Libertyville, Illinois, in 1964, and graduated from Stanford University in 1985 with a bachelor's degree in political science. Since 1997 he has been married to Janine Jackson, FAIR's program director. You can follow Jim on Twitter at @JNaureckas.

Thank you. Tom Friedman would do far better reading the economic history of FDR and the Great Depression than continue getting his economic ‘facts’ from watching television. At the very least he could read Paul Krugman’s column and blog in his own newspaper and educate himself before he writes nonsense and embarrasses himself by displaying his own ignorance.

One’s first impression might be that Barack Obama actually tries hard to be “Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.” That’s a very difficult trick in the best of times, but I digress. Obama is too tone deaf to do a musical. But, then again, so is Tom Friedman.

What is probably more accurate to say is that Obama is trying to be the Thomas/Milton “Siamese” Friedman. Weird, yes. But the organism actually actually meets USDA and G-M standards for borderline personalities. Half-dead/half-deader. It’s also Milton Friedmanism through Thomas Friedman’s back door by way of his oral cavity.

The earth is or is not flat. It depends on the speaking engagement, the audience of “have mores,” and their thirst to hear a message they think the public will swallow about the current “recovery.”

Let’s see — that’s derivative speculation, tight money, bank and financial house failures, overhauls at the public’s expense, and eternal indebtedness to the IMF and World Bank. Thrown a few banks too big to fail and bailouts of political patrons and the trillions needed for recovery sit in “banks too big to give a sh*t.”

But even even this became a hard to sell for a deceased Milton Friedman — Satan torture his soul or lack of it. Initially Friedmanism only meant jetting into a place like Argentina, Chile — or even Poland or Mandela’s South Africa — and setting the terms. Create hyperinflation externally, call for cuts or elimination of social programs, then continuing these social programs so underfunded they squeak when they walk. And they will walk — away eventually. Paving the way for a huge bailout by the IMF and World Bank. And the payoff was a huge privatization of everything national.

Anyone who saw this staccato turnover of national economies should have been wary by the time Thomas Friedman hit India. But the country that starts in monsoon country and dense jungle canopy and ends in the world’s highest mountain range was — miraculously — now the flattest around. True, the country could absorb massive amounts of debt by living off the cheap labor of the world’s most well-educated professionals this side of China. And there’d be no need to “slash” social programs in India. They were a madhouse to begin with. Its internal divisions are still more than remarkable for a country with thermonuclear weapons.

“Flat.” Meaning: the country didn’t need to be “nationalised.” It just needed to sell its industrial base below market prices while Indian billionaires took cuts that paid above top dollar — for turning a blind eye — to keeping India more in the 3rd world than accelerating toward the first. It’s so much money the Mughals would have wept.

But that oversight still gives Obama the ability to spin both Thomas and Milton Friedmanism. His job now is to sell the world that free market economic thinking is still the way to go while cheap dollars artificially raise the values of currencies that still count and also destroys the ones that don’t. In between “QE” and “QE2″ the Fed has also tied a millstone around the euro’s neck wherever it can. Amazingly, the IMF and World Bank still get to call the shots. But this can’t go on forever, can it?

Not while the Arab world is in foment and camp towns form in America’s cities. Starting with Lower Manhattan. Americans have finally found a way to get the MSM to actually HAVE to notice them. Bill O’Reilly must have to wear a “Depends.” How long camp town America can pay the price with winter coming on is a matter for debate. Unless you’re an American who really doesn’t have a choice.

Nevertheless, Barack Obama might well read Thomas Mann’s “Cepallo” — about Benito Mussolini. His puppet act is wearing a bit thin. Maybe shaving his head will make him look like Michael Jordan.

“”It becomes clearer every week that our country faces a big choice: We can either have a hard decade or a bad century.” By “hard” he presumably means like we’ve been having–and somehow keeping 9 percent of our workforce out of productive employment for a decade is going to make things better up through 2111?”

No Jim. You need to bite the bullet and do it far harder than the last decade. You think that was hard? That wasn’t even a taste of hard.

Woodward and B
I think this president can SAY it, and not be heard.Yes i do believe that.Friedman could read the exact same speech as obama but end it this way…I ACTUALLY MEAN IT.I actually perceived this as a complete ignoring of the president and whatever he may say anymore.
Pelle hell of a blog.Though lets not get personal on Friedmans,or Obamas singing.